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Catholic and Evangelical Law Professors Together

A group of Catholic and evangelical law profs have published a joint statement inspired by a similar statement spearheaded several years ago by Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus. Here's a link to the statement, which will be published in both the Journal of Catholic Social Thought and the Journal of Christian Thought. Its digital format (and content, for that matter) makes it hard to excerpt. So you'll have to read it for yourself.

The motivation for the pairing of evangelicals and Catholics in the original Neuhaus/Colson collaboration has always struck me as fundamentally political. The motivations of the participants in this current statement are not necessarily the same. Evidence for this comes from the content of the statement itself and from the fact that, while the group of law professors who signed onto this statement has a decidedly rightward lean, it includes a number of non-conservatives (e.g., Rob Vischer and Tom Berg). The statement does not delve into the reasons for continuing the Neuhaus/Colson project in the specific form of a dialogue between evangelicals and Catholics (as opposed to, say, among Christian lawyers more generally or religious lawyers together, etc.). But the particular tensions between evangelical and Catholic attitudes towards law and government make for an interesting set of reflections. It's definitely worth a click.